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AI is killing B2B SaaS

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Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#11

Post by guywithahat »

I didn't realize B2B SaaS products were in freefall like his numbers suggest. I'm not convinced customers are leaving to vibe code their own products but I do believe we're seeing a major shift in the market, pushed by the sudden relative ease of coding. There are a lot of B2B SaaS products which are outdated and I wouldn't be surprised if they're supplanted by much faster competition

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#12

Post by fogzen »

Having worked in enterprise B2B SaaS for a long time, almost every feature I built could have been a simple spreadsheet or some emails. So I'm highly skeptical AI is going to change anything.

Enterprise sales basically works like this: A non-technical sales team aggressively promises everything to win a deal to a non-technical procurement or exec team. When the deal is won, the SaaS sales team tells engineers "go build this" regardless of how stupid it is. And the customer tells their employees "you now have to use this SaaS" regardless of whether it makes sense.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#13

Post by namanyayg »

guywithahat wrote: post #11

I didn't realize B2B SaaS products were in freefall like his numbers suggest. I'm not convinced customers are leaving to vibe code their own products but I do believe we're seeing a major shift in the market, pushed by the sudden relative ease of coding. There are a lot of B2B SaaS products which are outdated and I wouldn't be surprised if they're supplanted by much faster competition

Yup it's definitely not because _customers_ are coding solutions, but the trend and motivation seems to come from the fact that customers are realizing there's something else possible except being tied into expensive recurring yearly subscriptions.

I was surprised when I saw the numbers from Bloomberg myself as well!

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#14

Post by re-thc »

Are B2B sales actually impacted or is the stock market just randomly predicting AI will impact B2B and selling off?

Since when does stock price / valuation have to match actual business realities?

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#17

Post by epolanski »

> How to keep asking customers for renewal, when every customer feels they can get something better built with vibe-coded AI products?

Wrong take. You don't need to build something better, you only need something good enough that matches what you actually need. Whether you build it or not and ditch the SaaS is more of an economic calculus.

Also, this isn't much about ditching the likes of Jira not even mentioning open source jira clones exists from decades.

This is more of ditching the kind of extremely-expensive-license that traps your own company and raises the price 5/10% every year. Like industrial ERP or CRM products that also require dedicated developers anyway and you spend hundreds of thousands if not millions for them. Very common, e.g. for inventory or warehouse management.

For this kind of software, and more, it makes sense to consider in-housing, especially when building prototypes with a handful of capable developers with AI can let you experiment.

I think that in the next decade the SaaS that will survive will be the evergreen office suite/teams, because you just won't get people out of powerpoint/excel/outlook, and it's cheap enough and products for which the moat is mostly tied to bureaucratic/legal issues (e.g. payrolls) and you just can't keep up with it.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#18

Post by gritspants »

d_watt wrote: post #2

I think one of the interesting things here is that AI doesn't need to be able build B2B SaaS to kill it. So much of the overhead of B2B SaaS companies is thinking about multitenancy, intergrating with many auth providers and mapping those concepts to the program's user system, juggling 100 features when any given customer only needs 10 of them, creating PLG upsell flows to optimize conversions, instrumenting A/B test…

Pretty much. My employer was looking to cut costs and they were spending ~500k a year on a product that does little more than map entra roles/groups to datasets and integrated with a federated query engine through a plugin. Took a couple days to build a replacement. The product had only a few features we needed.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#19

Post by warkdarrior »

namanyayg wrote: post #7
dotdi wrote: post #6

This immediately lost credibility for me with this quote: > And vibe coding is fun. Even Bret Taylor, OpenAI’s chair, acknowledges it’s become a legitimate development approach. Color me shocked! Bret, who directly profits by how his product is perceived, thinks it's legitimate???? /s

Good point -- removed for being biased and partial. Thanks for the feedback!

"biased" and "impartial" are antonyms. Pick one or the other.
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